I guess patch wasn't a good word choice. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but I was talking about the small city size, inability to play offline, lack of terraforming tools, no farming, inability to import maps, no modding, etc. Basically I was hoping for the same features from Sim City 4 with some upgrades such as curved roads and bridges, better graphics, greater diversity of buildings, better AI, faster gameplay. I like the added addition of mining for resources and water management, but this new game seems like a step back in many ways.

Sam's Drunk Dog wrote:I guess patch wasn't a good word choice. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but I was talking about the small city size, inability to play offline, lack of terraforming tools, no farming, inability to import maps, no modding, etc. Basically I was hoping for the same features from Sim City 4 with some upgrades such as curved roads and bridges, better graphics, greater diversity of buildings, better AI, faster gameplay. I like the added addition of mining for resources and water management, but this new game seems like a step back in many ways.

There are a lot of gives and takes, but I agree with what your are saying though. Modding was a big part of the community and that is completely gone now.

That said, there are a lot of new features and it really is an enjoyable game.

Sam's Drunk Dog wrote:I guess patch wasn't a good word choice. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but I was talking about the small city size, inability to play offline, lack of terraforming tools, no farming, inability to import maps, no modding, etc. Basically I was hoping for the same features from Sim City 4 with some upgrades such as curved roads and bridges, better graphics, greater diversity of buildings, better AI, faster gameplay. I like the added addition of mining for resources and water management, but this new game seems like a step back in many ways.

This game is absolutely terrible. Do not buy it. Even without the server problems it is a 6/10 game on the typical 7-10 IGN scale.

- The optimal city layout has already been found. It is a single snaking road. Why? Because every day the Sims in Sim City leave their house and proceed via the shortest path to the closest job. The next sim follows that person and checks to see if the job is full, if it is full he proceeds to the next nearest job. At the end of the day the sims go home the same way, they leave work and go to the first available house (i.e. they do not have assigned houses or jobs). So the optimal city layout is a single snaking road, with houses at one end and commercial/industrial at the other.

- The intercity trading stuff is broken, half the time it doesn't work and you get no info about it (this will likely be patched however).

- SimCity lies about its population size. The code was leaked online, and the numbers are fudged once you get above a certain threshold. So even though it says you have 200k sims, the game is only simulating 20k sims. This is why when you play the game "correctly", your advisers will always be complaining that you need more residential zones because you have tons of unfilled jobs.

- You only ever need one fire truck or police car. Why? When a fire breaks out, all available fire trucks respond to the fire. If two fires break out, the only way the second fire will be put out is if all of the fire trucks can put the first one out and get to the second one in time. Ambulances however work as they should for some reason.

This game is a catastrophe. I am convinced that it was intended to be a Facebook game, and once the facebook game market crashed, they converted it to a PC game. Do not buy.

Sam's Drunk Dog wrote:I guess patch wasn't a good word choice. I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but I was talking about the small city size, inability to play offline, lack of terraforming tools, no farming, inability to import maps, no modding, etc. Basically I was hoping for the same features from Sim City 4 with some upgrades such as curved roads and bridges, better graphics, greater diversity of buildings, better AI, faster gameplay. I like the added addition of mining for resources and water management, but this new game seems like a step back in many ways.

This game is absolutely terrible. Do not buy it. Even without the server problems it is a 6/10 game on the typical 7-10 IGN scale.

- The optimal city layout has already been found. It is a single snaking road. Why? Because every day the Sims in Sim City leave their house and proceed via the shortest path to the closest job. The next sim follows that person and checks to see if the job is full, if it is full he proceeds to the next nearest job. At the end of the day the sims go home the same way, they leave work and go to the first available house (i.e. they do not have assigned houses or jobs). So the optimal city layout is a single snaking road, with houses at one end and commercial/industrial at the other.

- The intercity trading stuff is broken, half the time it doesn't work and you get no info about it (this will likely be patched however).

- SimCity lies about its population size. The code was leaked online, and the numbers are fudged once you get above a certain threshold. So even though it says you have 200k sims, the game is only simulating 20k sims. This is why when you play the game "correctly", your advisers will always be complaining that you need more residential zones because you have tons of unfilled jobs.

- You only ever need one fire truck or police car. Why? When a fire breaks out, all available fire trucks respond to the fire. If two fires break out, the only way the second fire will be put out is if all of the fire trucks can put the first one out and get to the second one in time. Ambulances however work as they should for some reason.

This game is a catastrophe. I am convinced that it was intended to be a Facebook game, and once the facebook game market crashed, they converted it to a PC game. Do not buy.

The sewage wanders randomly around and cannot correctly be shared with neighbors, all of the safety vehicles are broken, and traffic is a nightmare unless you spend hours fine tuning all of the routes so that they avoid the glitches.

I'm still having a great time with the game, but I hope they can resolve some of these glaring issues.

This gets even better folks...I started suspecting this behavior soon after I started getting somewhat stable connections so I decided to test it out.

Not only will agents randomly wander around your city, they will also randomly wander IN AND OUT of your city.

You're asking, so what?

Say City A is a bedroom/commercial/water community and City B is for industrial/sewage/power and you have it set up so that they share their resources, City A sends City B commuters, water and poop, City B sends City A freight and power. Something you see in the real world in every day.

Remember that one freeway exit? Well it's also the ONLY path for any of these cross city resources to be recorded as transferring between cities. You know those little yellow/brown/blue dots wandering around the map? They wander randomly also, and ONLY when they happen to bump out the exit do they "transfer" to the other city AND suprise, suprise, they suffer from the same traffic jams as everything else!

I saw this first with sewage. The little brown dots were randomly wandering around my city going in circles, when they should have been being transferred to City B. Sewage backed up even though there was more than enough capacity at City B.

I rearranged my roads so there was a single straight shot to the freeway exit. Viola! All the little brown dots started heading for the exit single file and suddenly my sewage problem went away!

PensFanInDC wrote:I haven't even looked at a sim city game since the 90s. Those screen shots are blowing my mind...

This. I had SimCity 2000 come with my first Windows computer...took me a while to figure it out actually (first several times I didn't realize that zoning was crucial to the game...I'd sit there and wonder why there were no people!), never really got good at it either I don't think...

6X6 lots surrounded by road. Grid system. Put a police station in the midst of any big industrial zones. Dense zoning only. Profit. Oh and if you have mountains on the generated map don't hesitate to put water and hydro power on them. Having enough hydro power that you don't have worry about a power plant blowing up is a good feeling.

I needed this information 15 years ago! Eventually I figured out the grid system, though I don't like to "cheat" at games...if I know something works all the time, I won't do it or else it's not fun. The grid makes a lot of sense, but I would get away from it a little once I saw it was too effective.

I see the game has changed a great deal. It doesn't look like you have to run individual powerlines like back in the old days and what not...in those YT videos, it looks like you can throw together a functioning city in about 45 seconds and then work on maintenance basically...it seems fairly well automated, unlike in the old days...

In the old game, I remember a random section of buildings would lose power for no particular reason (had direct powerlines and/or other buildings with power touching them) and my water tower never held water (I think that was the issue, despite pipes) other than that, it took a fair bit of work to put the city together as I recall...now, it seems more like micromanaging than actual construction, at least from the screenshots...but maybe I'm misinterpreting...

I wondered about the garbage pickup issue. My dump was landlocked and I couldn't add any more zones.

So, as I mentioned here before, I created a neighboring city to be my dump. Loaned them money, zoned a huge dump, got more trucks, shared with the big city...but the trucks never went over to pick up the trash. I had to start incinerating trash. Eventually, they did get over there, but drove around in circles, never dumping the trash.

I sadly won't be buying this. The "always online" thing is a huge turn off. If I want to play online great, if not I shouldn't have to. It's purely for anti-piracy reasons as well. Someone already hacked the source code to turn off the timer that checks to see if you're online and the game runs fine.

PensFanInDC wrote:I haven't even looked at a sim city game since the 90s. Those screen shots are blowing my mind...

This. I had SimCity 2000 come with my first Windows computer...took me a while to figure it out actually (first several times I didn't realize that zoning was crucial to the game...I'd sit there and wonder why there were no people!), never really got good at it either I don't think...

6X6 lots surrounded by road. Grid system. Put a police station in the midst of any big industrial zones. Dense zoning only. Profit. Oh and if you have mountains on the generated map don't hesitate to put water and hydro power on them. Having enough hydro power that you don't have worry about a power plant blowing up is a good feeling.

I needed this information 15 years ago! Eventually I figured out the grid system, though I don't like to "cheat" at games...if I know something works all the time, I won't do it or else it's not fun. The grid makes a lot of sense, but I would get away from it a little once I saw it was too effective.

I see the game has changed a great deal. It doesn't look like you have to run individual powerlines like back in the old days and what not...in those YT videos, it looks like you can throw together a functioning city in about 45 seconds and then work on maintenance basically...it seems fairly well automated, unlike in the old days...

In the old game, I remember a random section of buildings would lose power for no particular reason (had direct powerlines and/or other buildings with power touching them) and my water tower never held water (I think that was the issue, despite pipes) other than that, it took a fair bit of work to put the city together as I recall...now, it seems more like micromanaging than actual construction, at least from the screenshots...but maybe I'm misinterpreting...

Oh yeah once you figured out the formula you could dominate. Then it became more fun to play random generated maps, not change the terrain, and make the city super nice and livable. A good amount of the cities I remember making had 3% or less taxation, it was a good feeling to have the people throw you parades. I hated allowing a military base and then having them not build anything except a runway. As always the goal was to build enough launch arcos to trigger the exodus then watch as they blasted off and you got all your cash back.

slappybrown wrote:So now I have no idea if I should buy this game. The PC games I play are APK style (Paradox Interactive, war sims, etc.), and if this game is as logically faulty as described, I don't know.

If you are used to deeper strategy games then this game will not give you much enjoyment. It is very fun at first, but it follows the "Chick Parabola". Game critic Tom Chick coined this concept, which is essentially: "An interesting play option which over-taxes the AI runs the risk of making the game more interesting in the short-term – as the player learns the system – but less interesting in the long-term – once the player masters the system and can use the mechanic to run rings around the artificial intelligence."

i.e. This is a fun game initially while you are learning the mechanics, but very quickly you realize that there are not many interesting game choices to make due to how broken everything is.

Aside: Have you picked up March of Eagles yet? Paradox release from about a month ago, it is fantastic. A very light game for Paradox, kind of an easy version of Hearts of Iron only for Napoleonic warfare. I'm having a blast with this game since it is so focused and you can finish a single game in like 8 hours. It is also geared towards multiplayer, but I have yet to try that out yet.

I was considering it when it came out, but the reviews I looked at made it seem like I would get bored pretty quick, and that it was too warfare based for a game that isn't supposed to be all about war. Though if you're comparing it to Hearts of Iron lite, maybe I should give it a try.

I too really was interested in this, but now that I've seen that quote and the map of how to build the 'perfect' city it has basically..ruined..it for me. If I know what I have to do to 'beat' the game then its kind of pointless to buy. Atleast now for 60 bucks. Maybe later or if they fix it so that building the snake road isn't a viable option. Thats a real shame that it was released with so many issues and broken so badly and quickly

Fire0nice228 wrote:I too really was interested in this, but now that I've seen that quote and the map of how to build the 'perfect' city it has basically..ruined..it for me. If I know what I have to do to 'beat' the game then its kind of pointless to buy. Atleast now for 60 bucks. Maybe later or if they fix it so that building the snake road isn't a viable option. Thats a real shame that it was released with so many issues and broken so badly and quickly

Yeah I think for most of you it would be better to hold off until the game evolves some. By then it may cost less as well.

Very cool news on the offline mode edit. I don't find it a big deal, but that is obviously a dealbreaker for many.

To be honest, I've had very little interest in playing the game. I got 3-4 cities up to 30-40k and never seem to have enough cash to grow. I'll let it run for a while, and comeback to find several zombie outbreaks, fires, and other disasters that require whatever money I have in the bank to get everything back up and running.

Despite being in several online group regions, I don't see a lot of interaction between the groups yet. I have a bus and train system that connects to others in LGP SimCity land, but that's about it. What do we need in our region?

Maxis is offering a free game after their disasterous SimCity Launch to everyone that registered.

Our SimCity Mayors are incredibly important to the team at Maxis. We sincerely apologize for the difficulties at launch and hope to make it up to you with a free PC game download from Origin.

Starting today, every player that has activated their copy of SimCity will receive an email that will give directions on how to redeem this offer, and you can also find more information on our FAQ. We’ll be opening up the redemption portal country-by-country so some of you may see it a little sooner than others. The portal will be live worldwide for everyone to select their game by March 22. We don’t want any of you to miss out on your free game, so please note that you must register your copy of SimCity before March 25, 2013 at 11:59 PM PDT and you must claim your free game by March 30, 2013 at 11:59PM PDT.

At Maxis, our studio values dictate that we innovate and create something that is quirky, complex and challenging. Sometimes this bites us in the butt, but our servers are green and we’re seeing record numbers of players all online and having a great time.

Here is the list of games that you will be able to choose from once you are able to redeem. It’s a great list of games across the whole EA portfolio, so pick one and add it to your Origin library on us!

Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)Bejeweled 3Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)Medal of Honor Warfighter (Standard Edition) Need For Speed Most Wanted (Standard Edition) Plants vs. ZombiesSimCity 4 Deluxe Edition We’re getting great feedback from our fans and know that many of you are having fun and exploring this whole new expression of SimCity. We’re humbled by your patience and passion for the game. Thanks for building something very special with us, together.